Archive

It’s not really possible to open The Casual Vacancy without a lot of expectations both high and low at the same time crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. I don’t know if it’s possible or even desirable to avoid them. I know I had a lot of, let’s call them feelings when I opened the book (which happened on Saturday morning; don’t ask; I work for the military-industrial-entertainment complex, let’s just leave it at that). I have spent many, many hours reading Rowling’s work. I am a known Harry Potter fan.

I also know enough literary sabermetrics to know that the odds of the book being good were not short. A lot of young adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying. All the available evidence suggests that it’s just a different kind of talent. The most successful example I can think of is T.S. Eliot writing both The Waste Land and also Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. And that’s not even a very good example.

But after about ten pages of The Casual Vacancy I began to forget about all that stuff, and online rumors about how the book was amazing or awful or had lots of sex in it. I forgot about how I had three days to write a review of a 500-page book. I forgot about everything except the pages in front of me. Because I had come under the spell of a great novel.

What surprised me about The Casual Vacancy was not just how good it was, but the way in which it was good. I suppose I’d expected a kind of aged-up, magicked-down Harry Potter, something that showcased the same strengths the Potter books do: Rowling’s meticulous plotting, her inventiveness, her love of mischief, her likeable characters, her knack for visual spectacle. I also expected it to showcase her weaknesses, because all writers have them. Yes, I’m a fanboy, but I still think the Potter books have too many adverbs in them, and not enough sex.

But The Casual Vacancy is a different beast entirely. It was not what I was expecting. It’s a big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, deeply upsetting and magnificently eloquent novel of contemporary England, rich with literary intelligence and entirely bereft of bullshit, and if it weren’t for Rowling’s stringent security measures it would or at least should have contended for the Booker Prize. This is a deeply moving book by somebody who understands both human beings and novels very, very deeply. It’s as if Rowling were an animagus, except that instead of turning into a stag or a dog or whatever she transformed into Ian McEwan.

Sam Bompas, a so-called foodsmith, said Montagu probably wasn’t the first to think of the idea.

“Other people were probably eating in that way anyway but they were people who weren’t written about,” he said.

It’s possible the sandwich could have been named something else entirely. The first earl of Sandwich had the opportunity to choose Portsmouth instead of Sandwich when he was offered a peerage in 1660, said Steve Laslett, one of the organizers of the Sandwich Celebration Festival taking place Saturday and Sunday.

“Today we could be eating a Portsmouth,” he said.

During the celebration, the east Kent town will have sandwich-making competitions and re-enactments of the earl requesting his namesake, the BBC reported Saturday.

The 11th earl of Sandwich, also named John Montagu, is scheduled to host a lunch Sunday.

“I am delighted to wish a happy 250th birthday to the sandwich,” he said.

There are still cabins left on the second of two cruises that will mark the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking this April.

The first cruise scheduled, the Titanic Memorial Cruise, sold out more than a year ago. The second one, scheduled last September, leaves April 10 from New York City, the same day the Titanic embarked on its doomed journey from Southampton, England, in 1912.

U.K. travel agent Miles Morgan, the organizer of both sailings, said the second cruise is 70% sold out, and that the remaining cabins are on sale for 50% off.

The eight-night Titanic Anniversary Sailing, on the 710-passenger Azamara Journey, will visit Halifax, Canada, where passengers can visit the Fairview Lawn Cemetery, the final resting place for many of Titanic’s victims, before arriving at the exact site of Titanic’s sinking on April 14, when memorial services will be held.

A final commemoration will take place at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, marking the 100th year anniversary of the ship’s sinking, and paying tribute to the passengers and crew that perished. The vessel returns to New York on April 18.

The sold-out Titanic Memorial Cruise, on Fred Olsen Lines’ 1,230-passenger Balmoral, departs Southampton, England, on April 8, and will follow the ship’s original route westward across the Atlantic to New York.

In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London’sNatural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic’s precise chemical make-up.

The aim of the study, which will take weeks to complete, is simple. It has been set up to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the identities of the perpetrators of the world’s greatest scientific fraud, the Piltdown Hoax. Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago, those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth.

The news of the Piltdown find, first released in late 1912, caused a sensation. The first Englishman had been uncovered and not only was he brainy, he was sporty. A sculpted elephant bone, found near the skull pieces and interpreted by scientists as being a ceremonial artefact, was jokingly claimed by many commentators to be an early cricket bat. The first Englishman with his own cricket bat – if nothing else it was one in the eye for French and German archaeologists whose discoveries of Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals and other early humans had been making headlines for several decades. Now England had a real fossil rival.

It was too good to be true. As decades passed, scientists in other countries uncovered more and more fossils of early apemen that differed markedly from Piltdown Man. “These had small skulls but relatively humanlike teeth – the opposite of Piltdown,” says Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, who is leading the new study. “But many British scientists did not take them seriously because of Piltdown. They dismissed these discoveries which we now know are genuine and important. It really damaged British science.”

Visit the Powerhouse today, though, and you’d swear the venerable locomotive was the Hogwarts Express. Since last November the Powerhouse has been in thrall to Pottermania.

Its Harry Potter exhibition, with costumes and models from the film series, is pulling the crowds unlike anything the museum has seen. A row of buses is parked outside. Queues snake through the entry area. A sign reading “Sold Out” seems to be a permanent fixture.

More than 180,000 people have seen Harry Potter to date, and museum staff are quietly confident that 320,000 will come through the doors by the time it closes on March 18.

The exhibition has been a boon for the Powerhouse which, if a NSW Auditor-General’s report is an indication, was seriously running out of steam. In the dry language of bureaucratese, the auditor’s report was frankly damning of the Trustees of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

Visitor numbers “fell by 19.3 per cent in the past two years”. There was a “dramatic decrease in the number of exhibitions” since 2007. And so few people went to the Top Secret and ABBAWorld shows last year that the $22 entry fee had to be abolished.

The Powerhouse disputes the report’s findings.

More chronic, though, is confusion about what the museum stands for. The outside signage reads “Science + Design”, which sounds like neither one thing nor the other, and in practice means incongruous displays of locomotive engines and contemporary lacework. As far as curatorial consistency goes, it’s a train wreck.

“Demand is outstripping supply,” Watson said by telephone. “We deal with people who often are cash rich and time poor. The credit crunch did affect things for a time, but before you get rid of the butler, get rid of the Ferrari.”

As Europe struggles with a debt crisis and the U.S. tries to revive its economy, burgeoning growth in emerging markets is boosting spending on luxuries like never before, and creating opportunities for more people to look after them.